Hannah Arendt in 1944. Portrait by photographer Fred Stein (1909-1967) who emigrated 1933 from Nazi Germany to France and finally to the USA. Fred Stein/Press Association. All rights reserved.
In 1933, Hannah Arendt, a 27-year-old German Jew, was held by Nazi interrogators. Mysteriously, she was among the few who were released. She left Germany illegally and found her way to Paris. In 1940, as German troops appeared set to occupy France, French authorities placed Arendt and other Germans in internment camps as “enemy aliens.” Arendt escaped that internment. She needed another miracle, which appeared in the form of a chance friendship, through which she obtained a visa for the United States. She then managed to secure passage through Portugal, arriving in New York in 1941.
Arendt’s experience as a Jew in Nazi Germany and her status in the United States as a refugee shaped her political philosophy. As she wrote, “Thought itself arises out of the actuality of incidents, and incidents of living experience must remain its guideposts.” She explained: “incidents and stories behind them contain in a nutshell the full meaning of whatever we have to say.”
